Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist celebre Vicki; and their son London.

This morning, I and the other 156 attendees of SVPCA 2017 received a useful document, SVPCA report_for attendees, which collects and analyses delegates’ feedback on the meeting. It prompted me to mention a few more thoughts of my own.

After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include , based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways of mapping morphospace onto phylogeny). It was a necessarily difficult talk to follow, and I did get lost a few times.

Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty.

Following on from his recent, and extensively discussed, offer to host SVPCA 2017, and a plan for the future, Richard Butler is now circulating his update, soliciting volunteers for the committee that virtually everyone agreed was a good idea. Dear SVPCA/SPPC friends and colleagues, We have identified you as a member of the SVPCA/SPPC community through having attended the meeting within the last five years.

We’re delighted to host this guest-blog on behalf of Richard Butler, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and guru of basal ornithischians. (Note that Matt and I don’t necessarily endorse or agree with everything Richard says; but we’re pleased to provide a forum for discussion.) Dear friends and colleagues within the SVPCA community; I am posting here courtesy of Mike and Matt with two objectives.